Odd Jobs (123 page)

Saul Bellow’s
A Theft
also bestows more love than the recipients seem to earn. A novella of scarcely a hundred pages, it is a curious work in several respects, not least the manner of its publication—in quality paperback, forgoing the hardcover profits that even a minor offering by our preëminent fiction writer would blamelessly generate. Bellow, at this point of his career, has sat atop the American literary heap longer than anyone else since William Dean Howells; it has been over thirty-five years since the publication of
The Adventures of Augie March
established him as our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist, and as the most viable combination of redskin and paleface in our specialized, academized era. Street-smart and book-smart with an equal intensity, he has displayed, in a salty, rapid, and giddily expressive idiom, heroes grappling with, and being thrown by, the great ideas of Western man. Until
A Theft
, he has not presented a woman as an autonomous seeker rather than as a paradise sought; his women have tended to be powerfully tangible and distressingly audible apparitions warping his heroes’ already cluttered intellectual horizons. This venture into the female soul has made both the redskin and paleface jumpy, the idiom becoming gruff and the great ideas sinking into a peculiar form of celebrity-consciousness.

For gruffness, take these sentences from the opening page, introducing Clara Velde: “So there she was, a rawboned American woman. She had very good legs—who knows what you would have seen if pioneer women had worn shorter skirts. She bought her clothes in the best shops and was knowledgeable about cosmetics; nevertheless the backcountry look never left her.” Got that backcountry look? I’m not sure I did, nor did the hurried case history at the end of the paragraph fill my mental dossier: “A disappointing love affair in Cambridge led to a suicide attempt. The family decided not to bring her back to Indiana. When she threatened to swallow more sleeping pills they allowed her to attend
Columbia University, and she lived in New York under close supervision—the regimen organized by her parents. She, however, found ways to do exactly as she pleased. She feared hellfire but she did it just the same.” She has had, we are told, quite a life—four husbands and three daughters by the age of forty, and a meteoric career in journalism that has left her high and rich: “In the boardroom she was referred to by some as ‘a good corporate person,’ by others as ‘the czarina of fashion writing.’ ” Who is confiding all this, with such aggressive breathlessness? A curious tone has been adopted, a gossipy tone, as if fictional characters were a subdivision of the rich and famous. These certainly keep fast company—for instance, Clara’s third husband, Spontini, “Spontini the oil tycoon, a close friend of the billionaire leftist and terrorist Giangiacomo F., who blew himself up in the seventies.” F. for Feltrinelli, in case you missed the news that day.

The celebrity parade doesn’t begin to roll, however, until we meet Clara’s true love, who bears the name, fit for an angel, of Ithiel Regler. “Ithiel Regler stood much higher with Clara than any of the husbands. ‘On a scale of ten,’ she liked to say to Laura, ‘he
was
ten.’ ” He never got around to marrying her, we presume, partly because there’s nothing, as the Princess of Cleves perceived long ago, like marriage to spoil a perfect love, and partly because he had been too busy chasing around in his curious profession of free-lance big shot, “a wunderkind in nuclear strategy,” based in Washington but treasured and telegenic wherever he goes. “People of great power set a high value on his smarts. Well, you only had to look at the size and the evenness of his dark eyes.” For all his “classic level look,” Ithiel is, like Bellow heroes before him, subject to “brainstorms” and fitful explosions of geopolitical opinion. He jets about sharing his wisdom with Henry Kissinger, Anatoly Dobrynin, the late Shah of Iran, “Betancourt in Venezuela,” and “Mr. Leakey in the Olduvai Gorge.” To Clara, at least, there appears no limit to Ithiel’s abilities. She reflects, while doting upon him in a Washington restaurant:

If Ithiel’s brilliance fails to flash out in the judgment above, and Clara’s adoration boggles belief, we are persuaded beyond doubt that Bellow’s fascination with the seriocomic world of international power has not abandoned him in the years since he penned
Herzog
.

Plot: The alleged countrywoman once upon a time induced the alleged wunderkind, at the height of their romance, to buy her an engagement ring, an emerald “conspicuously clear, color perfect, top of its class.” The engagement founders, but the sentimentally priceless ring remains in her care, is stolen once, recovered (though she doesn’t give the insurance money back), and then stolen again—by, Clara thinks, the sexy, slinky Haitian boyfriend of her solidly bourgeois but not unsexy
au pair from
Vienna, Gina Wegman, for whom she has strong motherly feelings. This is Bellow’s first fictional visit since
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
to New York City, which in
A Theft
he calls “Gogmagogsville”; in his updated view, Manhattan is still in the forefront of the decline of the West. “Unless heaven itself were to decree that Gogmagogsville had gone far enough, and checked the decline—time to lower the boom, send in the Atlantic to wash it away.” Gina understandably elects to sample the racially mixed local society. “The city has become the center, the symbol of worldwide adolescent revolt.” Clara comes into a party Gina is giving for her new friends: “The room was more like a car of the West Side subway. Lots of muscle on the boys, as if they did aerobics.” But Gottschalk, the “minimal sleaze” private detective whom Clara hires, sums up Frederic, the Haitian boyfriend, as “Casual criminal. Not enough muscle for street crime.” Frederic does do one plainly wicked thing, however: while petting on the sofa with Gina, he puts his combat boots up on Clara’s silk pillows.

The simple story is told in a purposefully dishevelled way, much of it by means of Clara’s confidences to an ill-defined Manhattan neighbor, Laura Wang. We are often reminded of Ithiel’s rather abstract wonderfulness and of Clara’s loyalty, which she shares with her creator, to a theological perspective, but we learn almost nothing about Wilder, her present husband and the father of her three girls, nor about her job, which seems all glamour and no performance. The book is jumpy and
skimpy, and feels like a set of signals to someone offstage. The clearest thing about Clara is her sparkling view of Ithiel; the murkiest, her maternal feeling toward Gina.

For all this,
A Theft
holds a gallant intention and a great gift. Who else but Bellow can swoop in with a coinage like “Clara found Ithiel in a state of sick dignity” or unashamedly physicalize an emotion in such a trope as “She felt as if the life had been vacuumed out of her”? A Biblical spirit is in him, giving vitality a severe grandeur:

The brain fever that races through a Bellow narrative can always catch fire into poetry, a poetry present in the otherworldly names he bestows—Odo Fenger, Etta Wolfenstein, Wilder Velde, Bobby Steinsalz. Marginal characters suddenly flare into an arresting vividness: Clara, visiting her psychiatrist, Dr. Gladstone, notes his “samurai beard, the bared teeth it framed, the big fashionable specs,” and while visiting Ithiel’s lawyer, Steinsalz, she “could not help but look at the lawyer’s lap, where because he was obese his sex organ was outlined by the pressure of his fat.” The pressure of an overflowing sense of life keeps Bellow adding touches to his central characters—filling them in, adjusting old touches. In a taxi to her last tête-à-tête in the narrative, Clara leans “her long neck backward to relieve it of the weight of her head and control the wildness of her mind.” Her big head weighs on her; we hadn’t known this, we are still learning about her, she is still being created, she is unfinished, in process, and perhaps that is the point. “Won’t the dynamic ever let you go?” she asks herself. Evidently not, if her lover is to be believed when he tells her, “Well, people have to be done with disorder, finally, and by the time they’re done they’re also finished.”

HYPERREALITY

T
HE
W
ORLD
T
REASURY OF
S
CIENCE
F
ICTION
, edited by David G. Hartwell. 1077 pp. Little, Brown, 1989.

So-called science fiction has been around long enough, abundantly and variously enough, to keep even a mega-anthology like this one from offering a launching platform broad enough for generalizations that will go into lasting orbit. David G. Hartwell, in assembling what his introduction calls “the largest and most ambitious collection of science fiction from all over the world ever compiled,” limited himself to “the modern period, 1939 to the present.” Even so, one doesn’t have to be an expert to notice omissions. Of the pre-World War II “Golden Age,” centered on the pulp magazines
Amazing Stories
(founded 1926) and
Astounding Stories
(founded 1930), selections by
Astounding
’s editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., and John Berryman (not the poet) are included, but nothing by A. E. Van Vogt, whom in one of his headnotes Mr. Hartwell calls “the wildest, least polished, and most aggressively creative of the 1940s Campbell writers.” Another writer alluded to often enough to pique our interest but not represented in the anthology is the “New Wave” fantasist Roger Zelazny. Kurt Vonnegut is present, but not William Burroughs. Calvino and Borges are here, but not, of those with international literary reputations who have been attracted to science fiction of a sort, Nabokov and Doris Lessing. Though Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, and Brian Aldiss are included, nothing is said of that vein of British dystopian prophecy that produced books famous far beyond
the confines of SF devotees—Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four
and Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
. C. S. Lewis’s peculiar Christian strain of SF, which led to Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
and a whole galaxy of mystical never-never lands, receives mention but no space here. And the transition from the sacred ancestors Poe, Verne, and Wells to the state of the art in the late 1930s is left to our already overexercised imaginations.

The fifty-two pieces chosen for inclusion range in date from 1937 (not 1939) to 1986; in length from brief gems by Calvino and Stanislaw Lem to a sixty-page saga by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; and in original language from English and French to Polish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Japanese. The order is not chronological, but describes a wandering course from the nuts-and-bolts adventure tales of the Campbell pre-computer era through assorted fancy software (transplanted consciousnesses, cloned identities, time travel, futures that look like the past, SF feminism, SF self-satire, etc.) back to nuts-and-bolts adventure, this time in Russian. One reads along, day after day, logging the light-years, noting the shifting angles of thrust, and curious as to the next coruscating comet to swing around the corner. There is some lumpy prose and strung-out dialogue in the penny-a-word pulp manner; see, for example, the tales by C. M. Kornbluth, Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, or savor such sentences as “A kind of glazed incredulity kneaded his face into a mask of shocked granite wearing a supercilious moustache” and “It was not only that patina of perfection that seemed to dwell in every line of their incredibly flawless garments.” The editor, however, has kept the overall literary quality respectable, and his knowledgeable headnotes convey enthusiasm. His categories—“Golden Age,” “New Wave,” “speculative fiction,” “alternate universe SF,” “post-New Wave,” and even “post-New Wave hard science fiction”—ramify a bit luxuriantly, and his critic-ese can overheat: